USA TODAY International Edition
Flagship Lord & Taylor store sells for $850M
In another sign of the ongoing shrinkage in traditional retailing, a department store that became a New York landmark has been sold to a company that plans to use it partly for shared office space.
The flagship Lord & Taylor store on Fifth Avenue in New York was purchased by WeWork, a New York-headquartered workspace leasing company, for $850 million. The acquisition is part of a larger deal in which WeWork will lease space in other stores in chains owned by Hudson’s Bay.
The Lord & Taylor store will remain open through this and the 2018 holiday shopping season, then will be converted into a new headquarters for WeWork, additional office space and a redesigned 150,000-square-foot Lord & Taylor store.
The change comes as traditional department stores are being challenged as never before by online retailers. They are responding by closing stores or, like in the case of Lord & Taylor, reducing their footprint.
Lord & Taylor says in a history on its website that it was the first big department store to move to Fifth Avenue and the first to have an elevator. “The windows of our flagship location on Fifth Avenue have been making an impact on the New York fashion scene for more than 90 years,” it says.
WeWork also has agreements to lease retail space within several other Hudson’s Bay Co. stores, including those in Toronto, Vancouver and in Frankfurt, Germany. The start-up, which has attracted funding from Softbank and others, has seen its valuation skyrocket to $20 billion, research firm CB Insights says.